Recipes, Carbonation and Competitions, oh my!

There’s a good reason why I haven’t posted the last couple of recipes I’ve brewed. They’ve all been right out of John and Jamil’s book, so if you want to know the exact recipes, go buy the book. Here are a couple hints though.

Bavarian HefeWeizen:

• Use at least 50% malted wheat, and the remainder German Pilsner malt.
• The mash will be fairly sticky from all of the wheat malt, but a half pound of Rice Hulls will help with that. Think of them as a mechanical device to help prevent the grains from clumping. They don’t add any sugars or flavors to the mash.
• Mash at around 152°F.
• Use a good Bavarian Weizen yeast strain, Wyeast 3068 or WLP 300.
• Try fermenting cooler than you might expect. Around 62°F for more clove flaver, higher (66=68° ) if you prefer more banana flavor.
• For you extract brewers, check out the fine print on your wheat malt extract. The wheat DME my LHBS carries is already 55% wheat/45% Pils. In which case you can just use all wheat extract. Sometimes it’s 100% wheat malt, in which case you would want to a similar ratio of 50-55% wheat extract and the rest pilsner or extra light extract.

English Mild:

One of my pet peeves has become this trend of “Imperializing” everything. Not every style needs to be amp-ed up to 12% ABV and 120 IBUs. The style guidelines call for around 2.8-4.5% ABV and fairly light carbonation. Although mine is not done yet its on target for 3.5%. This is than adequate for you to notice the alcohol and I personally prefer a nice session beer. I can sit around and drink 5 or 6 of these without feeling like someone kicked me in the head the next morning.

In other news, my attempt at kreusening with the Blonde Ale didn’t go exactly to plan. I think I should have waited a bit longer. The guides I read said it would take 5-7 days and I gave it a good 8 days in the keg. There was clearly some co2 pressure in the keg, but not enough to fully carbonate the beer. I’m going to give it another try with the upcoming Oktoberfest brews. They’ll be spending the whole summer lagering away, so hopefully that will be sufficient time to carbonate naturally. I understand that this was the traditional method of carbonating these styles and I would like them to be as authentic as possible.

While my attempt at natural carbonation in the keg might not have gone so well, this blonde ale is still probably my best batch yet. It’s been kegged for about 3 weeks now and it’s really coming into it’s prime. Unfortunalty that’s usually about the time the keg runs out. I’m going to bottle some up and enter it in a couple of competitions before it’s all gone. We have the local Shamrock Open coming up as well has the AHA National Hombrew Competition and the Samuel Adams Longshot competition. I don’t really expect to win anything, but the judging forms should tell me if I’m at least on the right track and what I can do to improve.

Tagged as: bavarian, brewing, competitions, english, hefeweizen, mild, recipe